$61.37
- March 2018
- Softcover
- 22 x 30.5 cm
- 120 pages
- ISBN 9781999814441
A book of text and image, My Birth interweaves photographs of the artist Carmen Winant's mother giving birth to her three children with found images of other, anonymous, women undergoing the same bodily experience. As the pictorial narrative progresses, from labor through delivery, the women's postures increasingly blend into one another, creating a collective body that strains and releases in unison.
In addition to the photographic sequence, My Birth—a facsimile of Winant's own journal—includes an original text by the artist exploring the shared, yet solitary, ownership of the experience of birth. My Birth asks: What if birth, long shrouded and parodied by popular culture, was made visible? What if a comfortable and dynamic language existed to describe it? What if, in picturing the process so many times over and insisting on its very subjectivity, we understood childbirth, and its representation, to be a political act?
My Birth, coincides with Winant's on-site installation at the Museum of Modern Art's Being: New Photography 2018. The complimentary projects were conceived of together, directly following the birth of the artist's first child and while she was pregnant with her second.
Carmen Winant is an artist and writer. In 2018, she will be participating in the group exhibitions Being: New Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, Another Echo at the Sculpture Center (NY), and a yet-to-be titled show at the Columbus Museum of Art; solo exhibitions will take place at Miller Contemporary (NY), Stene Projects (Stockholm), and Cave (Detroit). Winant regularly contributes to Aperture, Cabinet, Time, The Believer, and Frieze magazines, and is at work on a book about the nature of practice.